


Just Slower

by tielan



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Canon Divergence - Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Gen, Not Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Compliant
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-31
Updated: 2019-08-31
Packaged: 2020-10-03 22:15:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,450
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20460359
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tielan/pseuds/tielan
Summary: Within Steve, the sense of rightness settles - the knowledge that these people are here to do what's right, to fight against Thanos' armies and protect Earth - and the universe, too, all the way to the end of the line.





	Just Slower

**Author's Note:**

  * For [The_Wavesinger](https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Wavesinger/gifts).

Once the plan to attack The Garden is set in motion, things move fast.

Nebula somehow persuades Tony to join them.

"I'm not doing this because of any of you," he says, his voice rough and grim as he walks up to the group outside the ship. "I'm doing this for Parker and the others who died, and because Nebula wants to confront her dad."

"Tony—" Steve begins, then stops when Rhodey raises a hand.

"You sure about this?"

The grunt in the back of Tony's throat isn't quite a laugh. "Come on, Rhodey. This is me."

"I'm thinking this'll be the death of you." But Rhodey walks up the ramp beside Tony, and after a stiff and tense moment looking around at the others, Nebula follows without a word.

"Right." Rocket looks around at the rest of them. "Anyone else with daddy issues to work out? Thor? Blondie? No? Okay, last chance to opt out, because we're leaving and there's at least two days of flying ahead of us."

Steve exchanges looks with Natasha, but falls in beside Carol as they go into the ship. "You were thinking this would be fast and easy?"

"Fast, yes," she glances at him out of the side of her eye. "Easy? Not a chance. The Kree Empire's had dealings with Thanos; he's wiley and cunning and ruthless and determined."

"A lot of adjectives," Nat murmurs behind them.

"He's an adjective kind of guy." Carol remarks. "Taking him down won't be easy."

Steve's fists clench. He thinks of Sam and Bucky, of Wanda and Peter Parker, of T'Challa and the billions from Earth who no longer exist because someone else thought he had the right to wipe them from existence.

"Good," he says.

Nebula finds The Garden through luck and memory. A recollection of a quadrant that Thanos possessed but never visited with anyone, a carefully narrowing down of options, and a planet that shows signs of heavy terraforming but no civilisation.

"It will be there," she says, stabbing a silver-tipped finger at the hologram. "His refuge and sanctuary: the Garden."

"You're sure?" Steve studies it. "There's no shields on the planet, no defences."

"That we can see," Nat adds.

"He doesn't imagine he needs them," Nebula's husky voice is even rougher with suppressed emotion. 

Steve gives her a quick and wary glance. Out of all of them, he wonders most about Nebula's motives. By her own account, she's struggled with ambivalence towards her 'father', and Rocket's follow up on her 'daddy issues' doesn't make for a comforting telling. But she and Tony have been thick as thieves for the entirety of the trip. Exactly what they're doing, nobody knows. Nebula clams up the instant anyone comes within earshot, and even Rhodey's questions of Tony don't get any elaboration. _Programming of some kind, I think. _

"He did what he set out to do," Carol says grimly. "Maybe he doesn't care anymore," 

"We go in quiet," Steve says, looking around at the others. "Carol and Thor lead in - you're our heavy hitters. Tony and Rhodey are air support backing - stay high and keep an eye out for anything that he might bring from high up. Bruce, you're long range - use the mecha to target anything you see coming at us from a way out. Nat and Rocket and I are the gut punch - we'll go in low and unexpected."

"And Nebula?"

Steve looks Thanos' daughter in the eye. "If there are any defences that we've missed and need to disable, you're the most likely to know how he thinks, how to shut them down." He looks around the hold of the ship. "Let's do this."

It's anticlimactic in the end.

Subterfuge is lost when they get in and discover Thanos on the verge of destroying the Infinity stones. Carol slams into him before he can finish the thought, and a moment later Thor has taken Thanos' hand from his body - and the glove with it. But even once laid out and prone, the Titan is unrepentant, even as he faces his end. "It was my destiny," he insists, the severed stump of his arm bleeding out across the dirt floor. "I am inevitable." Then his gaze flickers beyond Steve and Nat, lifting to the sky.

Steve turns, dread infusing him as he looks at Tony and Rhodey hovering in the sky above, Nebula held between them like a bridge or connection.

"Daughter," Thanos' lip curls in a sneer,. "Gamora attempted rebellion many times, too. What makes you think you could succeed where she failed?"

Nebula says nothing, just bares her teeth.

And Steve sees Tony and Rhodey's palm blasters lift before Carol leaps at him, dragging him up and out of the longhouse. He's vaguely aware of Thor doing the same for Nat and Rocket—

The blast singes his hair, throws them up into the air with uncontrolled power and concussive force as the longhouse below them explodes into an incendiary fire.

"What the fuck?" Rocket's exclamation echoes Steve's sentiments. "You couldn't wait until we were out of there?"

"He was setting up for attack," Nebula growls. "He didn't have the glove but he could still use the stones."

And, indeed, in the heart of the fire is an ominously rising glow.

Carol swears - at least, it sounds like a swear. It's not in any language Steve knows. "I hope you bounce—"

That's all the warning Steve gets before she lets him go - a good thirty-foot drop to the ground. But it's soft earth, not hard concrete, and Steve rolls to his feet in time to see her direct a bolt of power at the inferno. Then Bruce is firing from the mecha, and a funnel of lightning slams into the longhouse, and Rocket is firing his weapon. 

He grips the shield T'Challa gave him and watches. This isn't something he can go into; it's time to wait and see how the dust settles.

Nat comes to stand beside him, her weapons out but not firing. "Overkill? Or not enough?"

"I guess we're going to find out—"

Then Thor lets out a wild ululation and flings the axe into the heart of the blaze. Is there a crunch amidst the crackle of the burn and the wind that whips through the blackened skeleton of the longhouse? Maybe. If so, Steve doesn't hear it. But one by one, the others leave off their attack, and the blaze begins to die down.

Everything is ash and slag, including Thanos - a large lump of ash on the floor with a smaller lump beyond it. Thor's axe is slanted into the ground just beyond the smaller lump, wedged into the stone at a slicing angle.

Tony and Rhodey land with Nebula between them. She's breathing hard, the expression on her face difficult to read. It might be somewhere between relief and grief, though.

"It's overkill," is Rocket's pronouncement, "but sometimes you need overkill."

"Well," says Tony grimly. "That's him dealt with."

"You couldn't have given us warning?" Steve asks Tony, because it's safest to be angry with Tony.

The helmet snaps back and Tony looks at him with the blank arrogance that always frustrated Steve so. "I could have."

"Not now, Tony," Rhodey interposes as Steve's grip tightens around the shield. His gaze flicks to Steve, asking for the space, and Steve turns away from Tony and goes to stand by Natasha who's crouched down by the golden pool of metal that was the infinity glove, slagged into the stone of the floor.

The infinity stones gleam in the burned and tarnished puddle of metal, six stars of hope and promise and terror.

The stones are a problem.

They're powerful beyond imagining individually; only a madman would think of putting them all together and working his will on the universe.

"Definition of Thanos," Rocket comments as they stand around the stones. "But that leaves us with the small problem of what we're going to do now."

Steve looks at Tony and Rhodey who are staring blankly at the raccoon. Carol and Thor are bemused, and Nat is frowning. He answers for all of them. "Use them to change the universe back?"

"Yeah, and fry your circuits while you're at it." Rocket throws up his hands. "Humans. You're all walking meatheads. Look, you saw Thanos' arm, right? You noticed how he couldn't put up that much of a fight? Using the glove wrecked his arm, weakened him enough that we could get him. That's what using the infinity stones did to him. And he was a Titan - the 'runt' Titan, I might add. You use that to change the universe back, someone's gonna be paying for it with their life."

"It wouldn't be the first time," Steve says grimly. Sometimes he feels like he's lived too long in this world, out of time; the lingering dissonance of unbelonging that haunts him at every turn. "I'll do it."

Carol makes a noise like a snort and doesn't lower her voice as she addresses Nat and Thor, "Is he usually like this?"

"Yes," they answer in unison.

"My father prepared for this all his life," Nebula says. She's been standing a little bit apart, a little bit aside. Is the solitude habitual, or representative of how she feels about this action? "He studied the stones, learned what they could do and what he might have to do sacrifice in order to achieve it."

"Well, we don't have all our lives to do this," Steve says a little more sharply than he means to. 

"I am Asgardian, Steve," Thor reminds them. "I have more resilience than even you."

"You've got your people to look after," Steve reminds him.

"So what's Earth?" Tony asks. "Chopped liver?" He looks around. "You know, Strange said there was only one chance in fourteen million that we'd succeed at this - and he said that to _me_. I've thought about that for the last week now, and I'm pretty sure that comment was aimed at me for a reason. So I'm the one who'll do it."

He says it with the arrogance so typical of Tony; like he's right and that's an end to it. Steve isn't about to let him just walk off and leave the conversation there.

"And leave us to explain to Pepper what you did?"

"Pepper knows me." Tony looks to Rhodey. "You get it?"

"I get it. But I think you're gonna lose this one." Rhodey looks over at Carol, who's watching all this with her arms crossed, her expression distinctly amused.

"So, if we're whipping 'em out and measuring 'em, how about we start with who's previously absorbed the power of an Infinity stone?" Her tone is almost conversational, but her hands pulse gold, a reminder of the power literally at her fingertips. "That, by the way, would be me."

They stare at her.

"One infinity stone isn't six," Steve counters.

"It's a damn sight better than none." Carol doesn't drop her gaze or look away, and she isn't going to give an inch. For a moment, Steve wonders if this was what Peggy was like as Director of SHIELD - unflinching and uncowed in the face of opposition? But there's a buzzing in his chest - it's not right for her to take the load when there's someone else to shoulder it. "Be gentlemen for once and let the lady go first."

"Nobody ever called me a gentleman," Tony notes.

"I got that feeling. That's why I said 'for once'."

"And this isn't the sort of thing you let a..." Steve hesitates. There's no good way to finish that sentence, and he knows it even before he sees both Nat and Rhodey shaking their heads at him. "It's probably going to be fatal."

"I've done fatal," Carol says. "And come out the other end."

Rocket looks from one to the other. "For what it's worth, I'm with Blondie. Glowy-hands Blondie, that is."

Nat raises her hand, and when Steve looks at her, she shrugs. "Objectively, she's right. She's the one most likely to survive the experience."

"Uh, I think that would be the Hulk," Bruce says, finally speaking up. "But...I can't call him at will anymore, so...I think we're going to have to use what we've got. And that's the Captain. The, uh, lady captain."

"The words you're looking for are 'Captain Marvel'," Carol says, unsmiling.

Rhodey snorts. "Lady or not, you fit right in. We've got all the self-sacrificing sorts around here."

"Fine," Tony grumbles. "You get to be the crazy, self-sacrificing one—" He ignores Nat's roll of the eyes, Rhodey's shake of the head, and ploughs on. "But you're not just going to grab hold of the stones and change the universe back. I'm going to make you something that will absorb the spillover power and you're going to use it to hold the stones."

Steve half expects a fight from her about this, too. But she smiles, sweet and pleasant and somehow inexorable, and simply says, "Okay."

What Tony makes turns out to be a glove not unlike the one Thanos used. He even co-opts the burned and melted metal of Thanos' glove as the base material.

"You know, this would all be over that much faster if I just picked up the stones and wished for everything Thanos has done to be undone," Carol says conversationally.

"For _you, _it might be over that much faster," Tony says stubbornly. "I'm trying to save your life."

Carol sighs and looks around at the others. "Is he usually like this?"

"Yes."

"Yes."

"I met him a week ago," Nebula says. "And...yes."

"Yes."

"Probably." Rocket shrugs. "Look, I met him all of five days ago."

"As long as I've known him." Rhodey comments wryly. "And yeah."

Tony huffs. "I'm right here!"

"Of course you are; I don't talk behind people's backs." Carol glances up at the sky. "I'd go check out the rest of the planet, but I'm worried about what you might try while I was gone."

"Worried? Already? I'm touched. And we've only known each other two days." Tony tinkers with a few more things on the glove. "Okay, well...I've only ever worked with one of the stones - Mind - and frankly I still don't know exactly how Ultron achieved consciousness—"

Steve's had enough of this. Absence doesn't make the heart grow fonder, it only emphasises just how frustrating Tony always was.

"Tony. It's good enough."

The look that Tony gives him is brittle and tired. "It's never good _enough_," he says in a voice of jagged edges and scabbed-over wounds. "But it'll do."

The glove fits neatly over Carol's left hand. She makes a fist and the glove flares - red-gold flame with a blue-gold heart. "Fits pretty well."

"If you put it near the stones, it should pick them up—"

The stones are still on the ground where they fell. They don't quite leap into the settings on the glove, but there's definitely a moment when they hover above the ground, neither resting on the dirt nor settled into the glove.

Steve's standing a yard away from Carol, and he _feels_ the power coming off the stones. "Are you okay?"

She looks up at him, the blue of her eyes is no longer human. "I think so," she says, flexing her fingers. Then she smiles, a gamine and feral curve of her mouth. "Ask me in two minutes."

"You'll want to—"

But Carol isn't going to take instructions - certainly not from Tony. She closes her eyes, curls her hands into fists and—

Steve's back in the forest in Wakanda, lying where Thanos threw him down after he tried to get the glove—

The glove!

Steve jerks up in time to see Thanos slammed into the ground by a bolt of lightning, followed by the hard swing of Thor's axe into Thanos' chest.

But...shouldn't Thor have aimed for the head?

Thanos leans in to say something - and jerks up and back. His right hand flails behind him for something that's been stabbed into his back. As he turns, he jerks again and this time Steve hears the shot that's been fired into his spine. As his left hand - the gloved hand - gropes for anything to hold onto, the empty settings in the glove gape like open mouths.

Thor yanks the axe from Thanos' chest, creaking metal and snapping bone, and as Thanos stumbles to his knees, Nebula and a green-skinned woman are revealed behind him. Nebula's weapon is still smoking, but the green-skinned woman's hands are empty.

It's hard to read Thanos' expression, but when he sees the green-skinned woman, he seems...shocked.

"Gamora..." He finds the thing that she stabbed into his back and pulls it out, still reeling from his wounds and the sight of this woman who must be the other daughter he claimed. It's a knife - small and gold, with a reddish gem in the hilt. He stares at it, as though unable to quite comprehend what is happening, then lifts the hand with the glove, frowning at the empty settings.

A moment later, Thor's axe slams through his throat and Thanos' head flies through the air, bouncing when it lands.

Gamora flinches and Nebula lets out a noise that's somewhere between a sob and a sigh.

Steve steps out of the bushes in which he fell as Thanos' head comes to rest just beyond the grey and broken body of Vision...

Only Vision's body isn't quite so grey anymore. It's gaining colour, like someone fiddling with the colour balance on a picture, and the Mind gem on his forehead is beginning to glow—

"She did it," Steve says, looking at Thor.

"_We_ did it," Thor confirms, then turns on his heel as something booms far away. "But that is...a spaceship...?"

"Steve?" Bucky steps out of the forest, like he did before. He's looking at Steve, a faint frown on his face. "What—? Did the world just...hiccup?"

There's no words for the relief that rushes through Steve as he looks at his oldest friend, as he hears Sam's voice asking Rhodey '_What the fuck just happened?_' A moment later they walk into the glade and something in Steve's chest loosens as he sees Sam, his eyes meeting Rhodey's with relief.

Nebula is saying something to Gamora, who wavers on her feet for a moment, then closes her eyes.

A moment later, Nat comes running into the glade, closely followed by Okoye and T'Challa. Her expression is a relief so strong that she looks on the verge of weeping before she delivers the bad news. "The warships are still out there."

"But Thanos is not." Thor lifts his head like a dog scenting the hunt. "Thanos we could not deal with so long as he had the glove. His armies are a different matter..."

He lifts his axe to the sky, and a flash of light sears across the backs of their eyelids as white tendrils of electrical power crackle across hide and harness and Thanos' soldiers scream in agony. The deafening crack of thunder that follows it splits the air asunder.

"Hey," Rocket shakes himself all over, "Go easy on the eardrums!"

"Uh," Bucky has half-turned to look behind them. "I think we've got more company—"

A glowing circle of fire is appearing in the woods behind them, and they turn, grimly ready to face this next, unexpected threat when Bruce says, "Ah, guys, don't shoot! These are friendlies... At least...the portal is made by a friendly..."

And indeed, two seconds later, Tony swoops through the portal, Peter Parker close behind him on a webbed line, and with others striding in behind them, ready to do battle.

Within Steve, the sense of _rightness_ settles - the knowledge that these people are here to do what's right, to fight against Thanos' armies and protect Earth - and the universe, too, all the way to the end of the line.

T'Challa comes to stand beside him. "Captain."

"Your Majesty." They don't need words for what they're going to do - they understand each other well enough. "By your leave." It's Wakandan lands, and so Wakanda's king should make the call.

"No," T'Challa says simply. "Together."

Beyond T'Challa, Sam's already rising into the sky, knowing what's coming. Steve meets Sam's gaze, and warms to the grin that forms on his friend's lips.

_I do what he does, just slower. _

He lifts the shield, symbol and signal, and T'Challa's mask comes down. Beyond them, Tony rises into the air, a red-gold match ready to strike a flame. The mask turns Steve's way and he nods. And Steve calls, "_AVENGERS ASSEMBLE_!"

And the fray is once again joined.


End file.
